A Plan Is Floating Around Davos To Spend $90 Trillion Redesigning All The Cities So They Don't Need Cars

Here's one way to solve global warming: Spend $90 trillion (£59
trillion) over the next few years to redesign all the cities — as
in all the cities on earth — so people live in more
densely packed neighborhoods and don't need cars.

That is one of the more ambitious (and possibly outlandish) ideas
knocking around the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland,
on Thursday morning. The Davos meeting is the annual conclave of
the world's ruling class: presidents and prime ministers, CEOs,
and religious figures (and the thousands of journalists who
follow them, hoping for a sound bite or two).

The $90 trillion proposal came from former US vice president Al
Gore, former president of Mexico Felipe Calderon, and their
colleagues on The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate.
That group hopes to persuade the world's leaders to do something
about humanity's suicidal effort to heat the earth's climate.

Part of fighting climate change will mean redesigning, or
building anew, towns and cities without cars, Calderon says.

"We cannot have these cities with low density, designed for the
use of cars," he said. "We recommend those cities should have
more density and more mass transportation." Together with a
program for reforming land use, and bringing deforestation to
zero, the total cost of this plan would most likely be $90
trillion in future investment, Calderon said.

Business Insider spoke briefly with Calderon after the panel to
ask him to explain where this $90 trillion was going to come from
and how exactly one might persuade every city on earth to go
along with it.

It turns out the $90 trillion is the total of infrastructure
investment that is likely to be spent anyway building and
upgrading cities. Gore and Calderon are arguing that it be spent
more wisely, to produce cities that don't encourage people to
burn fossil fuels just to get from A to B.

The key will be to persuade the mayors — again, all the mayors on
earth — that designing new cities this way will be vastly
preferable to the old way, in terms of efficiency and prosperity
for their residents. "The mistake we made in Mexico was to let
cities develop however they want, and it's a mess," Calderon told
Business Insider. It's in the mayors' "best interests" not to
repeat that "mistake," Calderon said.

The main problem is that mayors are not widely aware that the
cost of designing cities sustainably in the future may be cheaper
than the cost of letting development run unhindered and focused
on cars.